The HORRIFYING Impact of Starmer's Latest Attacks on Welfare

Right, so as always seems to be the case, when Keir Starmer wants to drop a big policy move he hurries to the nearest right wing hack rag, puts on his best Tory impersonation, which isn’t hard given he would be a far better fit in their rancid party than he ever should have been in Labour and pronounces more horrifying policy that he thinks will sound good and make him popular, at least amongst those still daft enough to buy said rags for their news, when the reality is what he is proposing now is going to wreck lives.
So it goes that today he has announced to the country that those on benefits are basically a blight to society, that the bulging benefits bill needs to come down and that there will be a crackdown on it. If he thinks this is vote winning stuff, stealing what was the worst most damaging mantras from 14 years of Tory abuse and misrule, then he has another think coming, because he got voted in to fix this mess as promised, not carry on ruining people’s lives, but when he takes his cues from right wing sources and right wing mantras he’s only ever going to repeat the harm done to so many ordinary working class families and I do mean working, because if he thinks he can get away with that George Osborne narrative of shirkers vs workers mantra again, he’s got another think coming and may his poll numbers continue to plummet.
Right, so Keir Starmer is back to benefits bashing because that’s always a popular narrative amongst the British public isn’t it? Turn on those with the least, turn on those who the right wing hate rags imply are getting something for nothing, turn your blame on them, we the government are, all whilst the rich who are really the problem in society get ever richer, because Starmer and Co value their donations to their party more than they do your ability to get by.
Once again the claim is that to get this bill down, currently £137bn it is quoted as in today’s Starmer pick of the papers, the dire Mail on Sunday, Starmer & Co are going after the benefit cheats, which equates to some estimated £1.6bn of that benefits bill. 1.2% of the bill then and that’s your priority is it Keith? Get stuffed Tory boy, you’re looking in the wrong place and you know it.
Now that total amount for the welfare bill is already a lot lower than quoted in many other places and over the last several years as they appear to have removed the state pension from these figures, which typically makes up about 55% of the welfare bill in this country, I daresay playing to the demographic who generally reads their nonsense paper, though of course there are a lot of pensioners who wouldn’t line a litter tray with it, better make that point before I get shouted at again for attacking pensioners, but why is it acceptable for the Fail to omit those figures, when working age benefits are ripe for attack? You’re saying some people are entitled to a benefit more than others and as much as many will argue the state pension isn’t a benefit because people pay in all their lives, it functionally is as far as the figures go and that is inarguable, unless you’re the Fail and you just seemingly leave them out and this is possible because there is no single definition for what the welfare budget even actually means. It is open to all manner of interpretation and that in itself is an issue it ought to be legally defined in my view to stop abuses like we’re looking at again from happening.
We have to look at this term working age benefits still though, because it isn’t necessarily people out of work who are claiming them. That word work does a lot of work, because a lot of benefits are top ups to low wages. Child tax credits, working tax credits, housing benefit, the equivalent elements to these within Universal Credit, it is a simple matter of fact that these top up low wages, that they are used as an excuse to keep wages low, they are used to subsidise employers, so instead of targeting the benefit, targeting the person being paid too little, target those paying too little, to pay their employees more. Instead, Starmer, the idiot, decided to tax employers more, string them for more National Insurance, which is now costing jobs and it is the low paid ones that will be the first to go. So how is that going to get the benefits bill down? More people will be needing to claim more money to get by.
More and more, the sort of demographics being affected by low incomes and their lives damaged by that are going to be young families. People are choosing to not have kids in this country because they can’t afford to. Death rates are now outstripping birth rates and when you look at stats where 72% of all the children who are living in and growing up in poverty are in working households, this is no longer an issue of cutting the welfare bill, it clearly isn’t giving these people the buffer, the safety net they need even for the basics.
But of course when you encounter any interview with a government minister, it isn’t these families that are to be targeted, it’s that burgeoning sickness bill and my goodness don’t they have the media on side when it comes to attacking these people.
It’s gone up in recent years thanks in no insignificant part due to the pandemic, which has left so many people with ongoing health conditions. If people are disabled, then they’re disabled. Look at the hoops over the last 14 years, with reforms to assessments, Starmer Labour under the vile Liz Kendall are also doing this again to make it even harder, to do all the more what the Tories have done for the last 14 years, to throw people off support for which they have an entitlement, the cost of which isn’t measured in financial savings, it’s measured in lives.
But the right wing media love to attack these people, it’s why Starmer went to the Fail, they’ll love it, it’s why people as down right depraved and disgusting as Isabel Oakeshott can go on TV and get away with calling people on benefits parasites and it’s hardly the first time she’s said deeply offensive things against people far, far worse off than she is opining from her ivory tower, forgetting of course that many of these people will be in work.
Even more a demonstration of the sheer ignorance of just cutting benefits and making people worse off when they are already struggling, is the consequences of that will do anything but get the bill down.
After 14 years of the Tories is it any surprise that a third of all disability claims now relate to mental health? Of course the Fail brings that up, as if these are people not deserving of help, but when you make life harder for people, it takes a toll mentally and physically and this is not something that can just be dismissed and at the end of the day.
Disabled people also still work though, however they face discrimination over that and that includes in regards to pay, all as Liz Kendall today on Laura Kuenssberg’s show, bleated about breaking down barriers into work for disabled people. Great if they can, 54% of disabled people in the UK do work, but not all can, but equally average pay rates for disabled people are 14% lower than able bodied colleagues. Why is that right? How is making cuts to benefits helping that problem?
All of this is another exercise in forcing those on the lowest incomes, those with health issues to feel less secure about themselves, question their self worth, end up with people feeling like a burden. Instead of helping with that, on top of all of this, there is of course that assisted dying bill going through and whatever side of the coin you come down in that regards, do you really want a government so concerned with making people feel as worthless as possible in order to save chump change for good media headlines with overseeing the legalisation potentially of assisted death?
There is no support system, the heath system is in disarray and being privatised, there is no functional social care system and all of this is stuff that should come before contemplating assisted death. Combine this with being made to feel like a burden and this rushed through legislation could easily end up guilt tripping people into opting for assisted suicide. For families that have financial hardships as is being inflicted on too may and set to continue, care home fees for elderly or infirm relatives are a nightmare and people have been terrified again by Liz Kendall, when she’s said on the matter that it was important to give choice or control to families. Surely not? Why should families get a say in whether you live or die and is there going to be financial pressure to go down the assisted death route to avoid care home costs people can’t afford? Again, this will be something disproportionately affecting poorer families.
What Starmer, Kendall and the rest of this evil government are doing is deeply discriminatory and deeply ableist. It frames those with the least as scroungers, once again stokes stigma and damages lives.
It is a political choice to try and get down a £137bn social security bill, when fraud is negligible, whilst finding every excuse not to go after those with the most, the 350 billionaires in this country having a combined wealth of nearly £800bn and only getting wealthier, or you could always make the Royal Family pay tax, instead of giving them ever increasing pots of public money they don’t need. Tax evasion counts for £122bn, that’s 100 times more than benefit fraud, how about that? And one more salient point it is worth sharing, because for as much as there is that £1.2bn in benefit fraud that exists, roughly £17bn in benefits goes completely unclaimed by people who are actually entitled to, through fear of stigma or pride, whatever the reason, savings are already being made.
Choices. Starmer has chosen the Tory way of attacking those on benefits and it’s time that we as a society rejected this as an acceptable policy move. Constantly attacking those with the least when those with the broadest shoulders never pay is something we should be demanding changes and if Starmer’s Labour aren’t going to do that, it is no party of the working class. How can it be doing things like this?
Fundamentally though this issue is part of a much bigger picture of life getting even more difficult, in no small part due to the not quite the economist she claimed to be Rachel Reeves as her qualification for running the nations budget has come in for serious questioning, almost as much as Starmer’s apparent qualification in human rights law does. Her world has come crashing down around her, with rumours even abounding she may yet quit. Get the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.